Tuesday, 5 January 2010

Nimbus implements FinancialForce Accounting

Adrian King, COO announced that Nimbus will be implementing FinancialForce Accounting in 2010, a native Salesforce Accounting application developed using Force.com platform FinancialForce.com is the sister company of accounting software specialist Coda.Coda is not new to the financial systems arena with a strong portfolio of applications and clients including IKEA, Next, HSBC and Avis.

FinancialForce Accounting takes a leap past traditional accounting systems by delivering it online (in the Cloud). Some of you may be surprised that we are happy to have our accounts managed on third party infrastructure and accessible via the internet. But I say “Why not, I have been using online banking for the last 5 years. Nimbus BACs payments are made online”.

Nimbus has used Salesforce for 6 years, and have become accustomed to cloud computing, taking advantage of Force.com. We have built our systems to manage every operational area of the business. Perhaps this gives us an advantage when considering new technologies. This blog will take you through our journey of implementing FinancialForce.com. The trials and tribulations, lessons and best practice.

Below is a snap shot of the email that was sent to Nimbus stakeholders by Adrian King COO just before Christmas;

Earlier this year we changed the expenses system to use Salesforce and introduced Job Numbers. This was the start of a series of changes designed to give the whole business much more visibility of where money is spent and being able to report the financial performance at all levels of the business more systematically.

The next major step change is to improve the company accounting system. Currently Nimbus uses Sage, which is no longer capable of managing the complexities of our business without a number of ancillary supporting spreadsheets. A project has been signed off to implement and migrate to FinancialForce Accounting; a full accounting system that surpasses our accounting system requirements into the future, as you might have guessed FinancialForce Accounting runs native to Salesforce.

The project will run in two phases. Initially we will get the core accounting system up and running. This will be followed by a subsequent phase where we integrate more closely with the opportunity management capabilities. The project is being managed by Lucy Mills Business Excellence Manager, and Seumas CFO will be the internal client. The time line for the initial phase is shown above. You will all be glad to know that we are taking our own medicine and the project is going to be driven by our processes documented in Nimbus Control.